susanstinson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
susanstinson) wrote2004-03-17 08:40 am
susanstinson) wrote2004-03-17 08:40 am
ghosts and horror
I'm reading exquisite ghost stories: The Two Sams, by Glen Hirschberg. Very scary, technically brilliant and morally gripping. I'm going to review them for Strange Horizons.com
I think it's a very bad idea for the US government to run commercials that show children sticking a fat belly buried in the sand with a stick. The fact that it's supposed to be a detached belly that someone "lost" walking on the beach does not change the damage that kind of imagery does to people's relationships with their own, various, warm, living bellies. It's a macabre, nasty image supported by skewed statistics and presented, as so often, in the name of health. Makes me feel as if I were breathing sand.
I think it's a very bad idea for the US government to run commercials that show children sticking a fat belly buried in the sand with a stick. The fact that it's supposed to be a detached belly that someone "lost" walking on the beach does not change the damage that kind of imagery does to people's relationships with their own, various, warm, living bellies. It's a macabre, nasty image supported by skewed statistics and presented, as so often, in the name of health. Makes me feel as if I were breathing sand.
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Walking on the beach is a lovely thing. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator, eating more vegetables, walking more, swimming: good things. Selling little stories about the fat parts of human bodies as inamimate, disposable objects that can be lost like a bag of trashed tossed on a beach -- stupid and cruel. Really. And measuring the good effects of exercise by whether or not a person ends up with no belly is a pretty foolish way to discourage fat people from moving.
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I agree 100%. Unfortunately, selling that story is also lucrative to those parts of the medical profession that benefit from people viewing their bodies as things separate from them and their body parts as things to chop off or otherwise rearrange to fit current fashion.
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And I waited this about a week to look at them, myself, although AOL posted the image of the belly in the sand being poked with the stick on the page I see everytime I sign on the day the ads came out. There's also something else nagging at me -- don't quite know how to articulate it, but something deeply disturbing about the US government pushing these images of body parts lightheartedly lost, that belly buried in sand to no one's dismay, when images of the dead in the war in the Iraq are being so stringently censored. And then the other deaths and injuries from bombings. It feels like some kind of very strange echo chamber of guilt and fear so intense that it has to be tightly, tightly controlled and offered as kind of a good-natured joke and good advice that everybody already knows...
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I've also heard and agree with the notion that the US obsession with fat distracts us from the fact that the US consumes such a disproportionate share of the world's resources. The pursuit of thinness is a superficial and self-centered substitute for real ethics.
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When I went looking for the ads this morning, I found all sorts of related stories, including a ban being passed on lawsuits against fast food restaurants and lots of rhetoric about people taking personal responsibility for being fat. It's something about that intense, focus on individual people's bodies, tapping into the strong stream of socially sanctioned fat hatred -- it sets off all kinds of internal noise that is SUCH an effective distraction from so many other things, including ways to try to take power. And the collective nature of our pain about this stuff -- how shared it is.
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I would looooove to read such a book.
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I'd email it to anybody else who's interested, too.
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